Quick Spins: Music review of Mr. Hudson's 'Straight No Chaser'

Mr. Hudson

STRAIGHT NO CHASER

Even in these dark, post-Video Music Awards days, it helps to be a Kanye West protege. British R&B singer Ben Hudson -- that's Mr. Hudson to you -- has been all but adopted by West, who signed Hudson to his GOOD Music imprint, and provides production and vocal assistance on Hudson's crisp new disc, "Straight No Chaser."

Hudson is best known as a backup singer on "Paranoid," one of the better tracks on West's "808s & Heartbreak." He seems to have taken the lessons of that disc to heart -- namely, that any song can be improved with the addition of pitch-correction software. "Chaser" specializes in intelligent if initially unspectacular white-boy soul, tarted up with synths and '80s-nostalgic new-wave beats and then pitilessly Auto-Tuned.

Hudson's vocals borrow equally from Coldplay's Chris Martin and Martin Fry of the Brit band ABC. He sounds vaguely Etonian; his diction is perfect. Even on the clubbiest of club tracks, like the bristly West collaboration "Supernova," he seems to have just popped round from an E.M. Forster novel. "I'm just a boy from Birmingham/Another impostor on a major label roster/How did I get here?" he wonders on "Knew We Were Trouble," though he doesn't sound puzzled at all; he sounds as if he had recorded the entire disc while wearing a smoking jacket.

Unfortunately, too many of the songs here occupy an awkward middle ground, not hook-y enough to qualify as dance-floor pop, not simple enough to qualify as the gorgeous, plaintive ballads they may have been born to be.

-- Allison Stewart

Download these

"Supernova," "Time"